[SLL] Hardware Recommendation

[John Locke]

Hi,

Dave Pfaltzgraff wrote:
>
> I know I may be opening a can of worms but I'd be interested in
> recommendations from the group. Some of my options are:
>
> 1. Forget doing it myself and utilize an off-site backup service.
>
> 2. Go to some form of NAS - say from DLink or Linksys.
>
> 3. Go ahead and build up a new system (and I have the above headache!)
>
>   
Well, if you don't do #3, you're losing some major geek cred ;-)
> Note that one requirement is easy (preferable invisible) access from
> Windows systems. The original implementation did this by putting the SAMBA
> share on the RAID.
>
>   

Piece of cake, if you're doing RAID 1. Like Jarod, I'd rather do 
software RAID 1--that way you know you can tell its state from within 
the OS... with hardware RAID, you need to rely on a vendor driver to 
tell you when a drive is degraded... some do, some don't.

If you need RAID 5, go with 3ware.  We don't trust software RAID 5 at 
all--there were some problems with rebuilding a RAID 5 array if any of 
the good drives had so much as a bad sector unmarked, a while back--and 
I don't know if that ever got resolved.

Any major current distro should be pretty quick and easy to set up a 
RAID array and expose it via Samba.


Other options:

* For #1, I've heard good things about JungleDrive... cross-platform, 
uses Amazon S3 for storage--transfers are expensive, but space is cheap. 
Good solution for long term archiving. I also like rsync.net, which 
provides raw disk via Rsync/SFTP, WebDAV, and FTP (shudder). Unlimited 
transfer, inexpensive space, with a geo-redundant option and a "warrant 
canary" if you care about your privacy 
(http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt). Can't get much simpler.

* For #2, you could regain some geek cred by putting FreeNAS on some 
embedded device...

Cheers,
John Locke
http://freelock.com